Can Watching Be Better Than Playing? Part1: Speedruns

Welcome to the second post of The View from Bottom Table.

Now when it comes to games I've always been the sort that plays, I like to compete against the machine and my fellow players whenever I can. So the idea of watching someone else play always seemed a strange one to me. That was before I discovered speedruns.

Now for those of you who aren't familiar with the concept speedruns are simply playing games as fast as possible but also in an entertaining manner for the very best of speedrunners. Now I understand for a number of people blasting through a game as fast as possible seems to be utterly pointless and I was the same before I was linked to Quake Done Quick, http://speeddemosarchive.com/quake/qdq/movies/qdq.html for the interested, and sat in awe as a group of mad bastards demolished their way through Quake 1 in 19:49 seconds. Now for someone who has managed to forget how to bunny hop no less than 15 times seeing that sort of thing blew me away. There have been various improvements over the years but that original still looks amazing to me.

For the curious the QdQ team are the same people behind Half Hour Half Life and HL2dQ so they know what they're doing. The final QdQ release for Quake 1 was The Rabbit Run where they complete Quake 1 on Easy in a shocking 10:58. So if you want to see everything Quake 1 has to offer go by at eye bleeding speed here's the link for you lovely people http://speeddemosarchive.com/quake/qdq/movies/trr.html so you can watch what 5 years of work will get you.

From there I found DeFRaG, now this holds a special place in my heart, DeFRaG takes an FPS and turns it into a glorious hybrid of exhibition, sport and general movement based amazement through abusing a couple of physics errors coded in by unwitting programmers. From the messing about videos of some guy hopping about a map, to the insanity of some of the higher production value runs, it never ceases to amaze me with what people can crank out.

My favourites in this strange world are a series call “mastering b0” just for the amazing tricks mew pulls off without any apparent effort, it shows skill in the extreme and considering the base game is an FPS it’s even more impressive that a couple of physics bugs could spawn something this amazing. For the curious they can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KVsSAw01Uk Part 1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljjtYiPOvsI&feature=related Part 2 and finally http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpmB524alSg&feature=related Part 3. Hopefully you can find these just as impressive as I do. Also the plasma section is skipped because there are some things that mortal man cannot do.

For a few years watching DeFRaG runs I discovered something new and wonderful Tool Assisted Speedruns, or TAS, which use emulators and various other computer malarkey to slow the game down, reset it thousands of times or pull insane things like pushing both up and down 1000 times in a second to glitch through things. Now most of these runs are boring and stale but the odd one comes through to shine, there is a famous Mario 3 run which appeared on the net and showed off apparently perfect play which was later revealed to be a TAS run. A version of it can be found here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz3BuYYhnn0 for you to enjoy the majesty of it. Checking http://tasvideos.org/  tells me that since 2003 there has been a grand total of about 35 seconds improvement and this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKvaWShi-oI is the current record with some inhuman number of glitches and resets to shave off all those vital frames.

Now a large number of people call TAS cheating but it can expose a large number of quite cool glitches and tricks, such as did you know if you make a 3 line on the NES version Tetris at the very top of the screen using an L block it will push the blocks at the bottom of the screen down by one? Well some canny bugger found it and it’s been used to great effect in this here video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unjyveiz09M&feature=related to make the fastest 999999 possible. Along with that there is a wonderful TAS creator by the name of Swordless Link who created an amazing TAS of Mario 64 where he completes the game collecting 0 of 120 stars. You can see it in all its horrific glory here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFlH90SrOKM and its 40odd second improvement here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9zOlNCBYkU which took 6 people 411111 resets to create. While it might not be them playing it with their own hands it’s still bloody impressive.

From there comes regular speedruns. Now I could never find anywhere any good to find these until I stumbled across http://speeddemosarchive.com on which I have spent many a happy hour. The sheer level of genuine skill on display from people who prove that they play just using human skill astounds me. I’m only going to highlight the runs I enjoy most and I’ll leave you to browse around and see what else takes your fancy.

Here are my top 5 runs for you to enjoy before finding things you love yourself.
At number 5 is Sonic the Hedgehog in 18:12, some of the stages it takes longer to count the points than to actually run. It can be found here: http://speeddemosarchive.com/demo.pl?Sonic2_1812 for your viewing pleasure.
At number 4 is a 100% run of Megaman X clocking in at 38:57 and shows just how fast you can complete a game while not missing a thing. It can be found here: http://speeddemosarchive.com/demo.pl?MegaManX_SS_100p_3857 for you to enjoy.
At number 3 is Megaman 2 in 27:49 abusing every glitch that can be used to squeeze each second out of the game. It can be found here: http://speeddemosarchive.com/demo.pl?MegaMan2_SS_2749 and is one of the first games to have been seriously speedrun.
At number 2 is a 16 star Mario 64 run which shows that even normal players can take the piss with gravity from time to time. It still amazes me some of the jumps that are made with complete ease by the player and I hope you enjoy watching it as well here: http://speeddemosarchive.com/demo.pl?Mario64_16stars_1731 17:31 to complete a game which took me months when I first played it.
At number 1 is Mario Bros 1 clocking in at 5 minutes is only 2.69 seconds slower than the current TAS record which required 9739 resets and the most amazing part was it was set by the contributors little brother. It’s amazing to see the game played so well and cleanly by a normal person on a standard console with no autofire or jiggery pokery what so ever. It can be viewed in all its glory here: http://speeddemosarchive.com/demo.pl?Mario1_500 for your enjoyment.

Hopefully I’ve opened people’s eyes a little to the amazing standard of gameplay out there. I apologise for the lateness of this post but I’ve been watching the videos myself and have had some terrifying gut rot to contend with tonight.